


home again

by songbird97



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Splash Free, Angst, Character Death, Fluff, M/M, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Sex, Mentions of Violence, Reincarnation, Romance, but also includes the canon story briefly, but i'm not making it a major tag because ... y'know ... reincarnation, idk man there's a lot in here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 10:32:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10717659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songbird97/pseuds/songbird97
Summary: He thinks that it might be different if Haru ever remembered him in the same way. But no matter how they find each other, Haru never does.In which Rin hasn't asked to be reincarnated, and certainly hasn't asked to remember each lifetime. Written for RinHaru Week 2017.





	home again

**Author's Note:**

> turning this in a little late, but as i kept writing it just kept getting longer and longer and longer. on the upside, i think i like how it turned out! i'm posting this at 5am, also, so i apologize for any typos/missed things. let me know if there's anything big that needs to be fixed, though! 
> 
> and happy rinharu week, day one!

He dies, because he has to, before he ever knows that he’s cursed.

The memories come to him slowly. He is three, and talks to his mother of a breezy backyard she’s never taken him to, a dusty old bookstore they’ve never seen, and she smiles and nods at the ramblings. No one takes it seriously, so he doesn't, either.

It changes when he gets older. Rin tries, for some time, to convince himself that it all comes from dreams. Some of it does, anyway, vivid images of that bookstore over and over, or of that breezy backyard opening up into a field of flowers behind a layer of trees, kids riding by on bicycles, and someone bright taking his hands. But sometimes the dreams aren’t dreams—the images come to him in class, or when he’s doing homework, or when he’s eating at the dinner table.

This life, so far, is simple and warm and full of ocean views; life in a coastal city with tall buildings, and Rin is sixteen years old when he realizes this life is the second one he’s lived.

(Or at least, the second one he remembers.)

Because by sixteen, he knows it all. He knows he loves water because of memories of sailing, of diving, of river trips with smiling friends. In this life he swims for sport, but he knows the man he was last never would have. Somehow.

In this life he has a mother, too, and a sister; neither of which he had previously. And he looks the same, knows what he will look like when he’s older, or what he should look like, based on memories of photos and mirrors and glassy, reflective ponds. But none of this is how he knows it was real.

“We’re going on a trip up north,” his mother tells him, during summer break when he’s fifteen. “Just for a week! It’ll be good for us to get out of the city, Rin.”

The drive up to Massachusetts from Florida is the longest of Rin’s life, without competition. He doesn’t think he should count the ones in his dreams, where he’d drive for hours and hours just because he could. In reality, he and his sister have never been farther north than the Carolinas.

But they go, and like someone’s cracked his body open and dumped the rest of his soul in, he remembers everything he hasn’t yet once he steps foot on the private land behind the summer home. The weeds and the marsh and the horizon over the ocean are all things he’s seen before, felt beneath his hands and feet before, spent a weekend and a week and a month staring at before. One of the many images he’d thought he’d created in his mind, spread out in front of him.

It isn’t all. He remembers at a pace faster than he ever has before today, faces and names and sunsets and travel. Rin can recall every time he’s come to this beach house, and as if he needed proof—as if he needed anything else to freak him the fuck out—he thinks of the lone couple in his previous friend group, the ridiculous heart they’d carved below the back porch, and finds it underneath a layer of dirt. Years old, and fading.

And more come, and this is how he lives this life; with knowledge he didn’t ask for and questions he can’t know the answers to. But it is a nice life—boring, maybe, in comparison to the freedom of the last one, but he isn’t ever disappointed to live it.

He swims, in high school and in college, competes but not professionally. He drives, but not like he remembers it. He works as a writer, and it is as close to freeing as the memories make him feel that he can get.

From the beginning, something is missing.

As an adult, all he really does is work. He gets lost in it, because he supposes that’s what happens when you’re fortunate enough to do something you love as a living. He has friends that take up his time pleasantly, and he has fleeting love that never really lasts, but he is somehow fine with this, because loving never quite feels right.

“But you’re such a romantic,” a friend tells him once, with an endearing smile and disbelief in their tone, a ring on their finger they’d caught Rin staring at a little too long. He agrees, because it’s true, but it doesn’t change that he’s never been as happy as he should be with the romance he’s been given.

The only new memories he receives past twenty-five are of the bright person from when he was a child, taking his hands and smiling gently. He never sees a face, but he does see parts of it. More than anything, he just sees blue.

It doesn’t really bother him, or at least not enough that he notices often. Rin notices as often as he notices couples acting the kind of in love that only comes with the confidence they’ve found the best person they can for themselves. Notices, and then is reminded that he may have already gotten that, in a life that’s blurry to him, and thinks that maybe he’s already gotten his turn and won’t ever again.

This is the only thought that bothers him, and when it does it is too sobering to bear, so he writes.

Rin doesn’t really remember dying, but he knows that it had to have happened. He likes to think that it did on some big adventure, among the many he can remember, but it probably happened in a simple way, a boring one, and he’s alright with that. He fulfills himself in this life by loving his family and his friends, and is content with the past love he can’t remember, because he writes about it. Writes the fantasy of it, anyway, over and over and in different ways. And it is enough.

His death in this life happens quickly, and when he has lived a long life.

But the universe isn’t done with him yet.

-

It’s quicker in his third life, understanding, because with the memories of his two lives come the memory of knowing. And if there was doubt before, he has no room for it now.

He gets a father in this life, but not for long. He dies in a storm at sea, working as a fisherman, but Rin’s mother and sister remain, more than enough. They are different souls entirely from what he can remember, but like in his past two lives, they are the ones he presently knows best.

And in this life, spent in small-town Japan, he meets Haru.

It is through swimming, because of course it is. He keeps swimming even after the water takes his father, not only because of the connecting factor between the three lives he’s been given but because his father loved it, too. And it’s a sad reason, maybe, or a stupid one, but this is the first father he’s ever gotten, and he’d like to honor that if he can.

He decides to dedicate this life to his dream. And honestly, Rin expects nothing more from it.

Haru comes out of nowhere. From word of mouth Rin hears of the fastest kid in Iwatobi, the stubborn one who’ll only swim one stroke, although he hears of different strokes from different people so he isn’t so sure it’s true. Not until they actually meet.

It’s odd, having the knowledge one can only get from living a full life when you’re a child—odd because he feels the same childish excitement and naivety any other child would, but it is overlapped, sometimes, when the wisdom he can’t escape comes through. But when the boy with the flawless front crawl climbs out of the water, he looks at Rin with the most foreign maturity Rin’s ever seen, and in the smallest way, Rin feels less lonely.

He latches. He doesn’t mean to, but the ease in Haru’s eyes and the curious, grumpy pull of his eyebrows and mouth is different and wonderful to see. And if living three times has taught Rin anything, it is to live indulgently—when Haru hesitates, Rin pulls harder. And Haru always gives eventually.

Rin doesn’t expect the depression when it hits.

Australia is a decision made on a whim. He doesn’t see it as a big deal, even if he is nervous to leave what’s familiar to him in this life—he doesn’t expect to lose contact with Haru, or Makoto and Nagisa, or Sousuke. He also doesn’t expect the loss to be on him.

But he fails. Not beautifully, and not in a way he learns from. He doesn’t learn positively, anyway. He keeps failing, and what he learns is to stop thinking he can do anything he likes. He learns to give up, and to succumb to disappointment in himself. He learns that he can’t do his only father justice.

His last resort, although an unplanned one, thought of only when cornered along train tracks by big blue eyes and a rare, rare smile, is Haru’s consistent ability to take the loneliness away.

It doesn’t work. And so he leaves, and he is sure that this time, it will be for good.

“We miss you so much,” his mother says, though, years later. “I think it’s time for you to come home.”

He thinks that there are more to her words than even she knows. He has long accepted being selfish in this life, but has never accepted that it’s made his mother and Gou miserable for him.

Rin blinks, sat on a beach and staring at the horizon. They are coming to an end of a hot Australian summer, and he has not stepped foot in the ocean even once.

He says, “Alright.”

The months that follow go like this: encounters, re-encounters, reunions. Unhappy ones, mostly. Depression, loneliness, confusion, frustration. And swimming, again. Finally. Anger, disappointment, more confusion, and Haru. Older, and bluer, and beautiful.

Haru, Haru, Haru. Tears, and clarity. And for the first time since his childhood, a memory.

When they are under the barren tree, when Haru yells and lets Rin cry and breaks something so integrally tragic, when he extends a hand to Rin; he is bright. So bright.

And as if Haru has painted it himself, the blankness from Rin’s first life is filled.

Afterwards, he doesn’t look at Haru the same again, because he can’t. Finding out that his pull towards Haru is because he’s known him in a life already lived is unlike any other feeling. It is beautiful, and so is Haru. But it is terrifying, and so is Haru.

Rin starts caring about things he never had before—he counts the number of times Haru smiles at him in a day. He gets distracted staring, at Haru’s hands, and hair, and eyes. The lack of loneliness turns into a wholeness, a desire to be around Haru whenever he isn’t and a desire to be closer when he is. It is everything romance wasn’t before. Addictive, and warm, and anticipatory.

But just as Rin thinks that they’re wired to be around each other, they are wired to clash. And it happens like this, unable to happen another way.

They fight. Rin is finished with his first year of college and Haru is not far behind; it is January and snowing, and frustration follows them down the stairs in Haru’s house.

“Rin,” Haru says, in that tone he uses when he feels Rin is making a big deal out of nothing, and Rin feels his annoyance spike higher.

It’s a stupid fight. They’ve been hitting this wall over and over for two years now—Rin giving unwanted advice and Haru dismissing it, both taking it too personally, both too stubborn to admit any wrongfulness.

The fire had gone into Haru’s eyes, but not the kind that Rin likes to see. And so they argued, about Haru’s anxiety surrounding the future and change and Rin’s ignorance about helping, of his insistence and nosiness and Haru’s tendency to _block_. They fought and they fight now, still, anger in the creases of Rin’s brow.

“I didn’t ask you to leave,” Haru says, but doesn’t come down the last few steps.

Rin struggles to get his shoes on. “You didn’t fucking ask me to stay, either,” he says. He stomps his foot down, crushing the heel of his shoe and turning on it. “Bye.”

He slams the door so hard it rattles where it’s supposed to slide. The snow is still coming down, and Rin only gets far enough to pull his hood up before he stops.

It’s frustrating, that he still feels this way through all of his anger, every time. But maybe it is also healthy, because it is the guilt and the worry that sink his heart into his stomach, and that make him turn back around.

They fought. And when Rin goes back and almost knocks, Haru slides the door open like he’d known.

“Sorry,” Rin says.

Haru is quiet for a while, turning many thoughts over and over in his head. Rin can see it through his eyes. He says, “You don’t have to be.”

“Yeah, I do,” Rin says, smiling in spite of himself. “Or maybe I don’t, I dunno. But I am.”

Haru says nothing. But he is looking at Rin, and this doesn’t seem like agreeance or dismissal.

“I know that your life isn’t any of my fucking business,” Rin says, eventually. “I don’t act like it, but I know. I just … I watch you swim, and it’s like I can’t imagine you doing anything else, because of the way you make everyone feel when you do it. The way you make me feel, you know?”

“When I swim,” Haru says.

“Fuck, Haru, always,” says Rin, dropping himself against the doorframe. “You always …”

The lights are off in Haru’s hallway, making his shadow stretch long and tall. It looks as lonely as Rin can understand. And Haru paints it there, standing and watching him fumble over his words without a twitch of hesitation.

“Dammit,” Rin says, and comprehension sparks behind Haru’s eyes just quick enough for Rin to see before he steps forward and kisses him.

He hears Haru inhale sharply through his nose, then hears something like rushing water over blaring sirens. Red flags burst forth behind his eyelids, and when he pulls away he jumps away, like his neck has a spring in place of his spine. He feels as stunned as Haru looks, but mostly he feels the warmth left over on his mouth, the absence of the pressure he’d very quickly gotten used to.

“Sorry,” he says, quietly.

Haru blinks. This is not the longest Rin’s seen him look stunned, and it fades mercifully quickly. He says, voice uneven, “You don’t have to be.”

It’s five seconds or so before they kiss again, and much, much longer until they stop.

  


And so it goes. Through college they are on and off, because their romantic life is not unlike their platonic life; they fight, stupidly, and over stupid things, and make up just as quickly. It’s a struggle, not to love each other but to understand loving each other. For Rin it is a lifetime and a half foreign, and he considers telling Haru this often.

He always decides against it.

Haru does compete in the Olympics, but only once. It is of his own discretion, his own decision. Rin knows part of it is a compromise—but Haru is happy doing it, and Rin is happy to see him do it, even if it is only once. Because once is enough to amaze the world, and the world is as dazzled as Rin has ever been.

The difference is that the world is dazzled from a blissful distance away, though, while Rin can still be amazed up close—with their relationship comes another good thing about competition, in that Haru is always so quick to pull him close after, alone together away from the cheering crowds and flashing cameras, where they can kiss and hold how they want. Sex with Haru is another world entirely, unfolding and private and deep. Intimate; Haru always holds so tight.

By the time Rin retires, they’re long past their immaturity. They settle and feel settled and are settled, easily, with each other and their life. Quite literally lost in love, it is easy to forget, even for someone like Rin, that time can pass so terribly quick.

“You’re losing your touch, old man,” Rin huffs at the edge of a public pool, when they’re forty and racing still, and Haru is getting slower.

Haru’s response is an out-of-breath, “Can’t hear you over your rusty metal knee, Rin,” and Rin laughs so hard he slips back under.

They become older, and become happier, too. Or maybe just more aware of their happiness—Rin doesn’t think it matters either way. Rin is amazed, continuously, that he never stops finding new things to love about Haru. One year it is the sprout of silver hair and another it’s the wrinkles by his eyes. They love and they love, and it never stops for a second.

That is, it never stops until it has to.

Rin is used to loss. But not like this: Haru dies first.

It is agonizing. There's no other word that fits. Even after a lifetime lived better than he ever could have hoped for, it feels incomplete leaving it without Haru.

Haru goes long after they’re both old and grey, though, and peacefully, and Rin follows not many months later. He thinks he should be used to dying by now, but this time it’s emptier than it has ever been before. He knows this even without the memories of dying, the feeling itself enough of a reminder.

And this time, he goes backwards.

-

Or maybe too far forward, or neither, or both, gone to some other earth that’s simply different from the one he’d lived his previous lives on. Whichever it is, this life is filled with sand dunes and crystal oases scattered around, few and far between.

Like always, his memories come to him as he gets older, and as he grows accustomed to the life he’s been born into this time around. There is a struggle for water, naturally, and a beautiful kingdom, but no mention of anything familiar to him from past-life textbooks or history lessons. What he knows is what he is raised in, and he is raised in silk and colorful tents, to a mother who works in the palace.

She dies while Rin is still young, much like his father in his previous life, but of a different tragedy—illness. An illness that takes nearly a quarter of their people, but Rin’s mother is the one whose death shakes the kingdom the most. A clairvoyant and a medium, she had represented hope for many, including the royal. And when she died, she had left Rin with everything he needed to continue her work.

Not that he wanted to. Not entirely.

But the public was fascinated by and relied on the idea of a child to guide them through their misfortune, and so he worked. And so he saw. The sick were green, always—the hopeful were golden, the greedy violet. The beautiful, blue.

He feels the longing, though, long before he even remembers who the longing is for, and this makes his job difficult. A reader of souls, Rin was able to feel that his own seemed displaced from another. It is only at fifteen years old, when a crying woman, distraught with grief for her deceased husband, stumbles into his tent with a deeply shattered heart, that he remembers through past, kindred grief.

And so Rin starts longing for Haru instead of longing for something he can’t figure. Although, with the impossibility of finding Haru here, he sometimes wonders what the difference truly is.

As soon as he reaches eighteen, women of all statuses come in hopes that he’ll decide to court them, and this is perhaps the worst torture of all. He thinks of being in love again and imagines it to be wonderful, even wants it, but the more he thinks of dark hair beneath his fingertips and blue eyes blinking tiredly the more he thinks that a love with someone else could never compare.

He wonders how long that kind of thinking will last.

Living and working in the palace means that distracting himself is easy enough, however, and so he makes use of the private oasis daily. Staying clear of the royal family, he’ll swim for hours when he can, in between visitors or when he can’t sleep at night, when missing someone becomes missing pieces of himself. The water coaxes his mind quiet.

And later, just days after his twentieth birthday, he learns why it always worked so well.

He’s clearing the candles from the table and taking down the sashes when he hears the curtain open, and he doesn’t bother to turn around. The footsteps are slow and heavy, and had been coming for a while.

“You must be passing through,” he says, tiredly—it has been a long day. “Otherwise you would know that no visitors are allowed to come by here after palace curfew.”

The footsteps stop, and the visitor is quiet for a long while. Without looking, Rin knows exactly where they are in his tent. Their aura is nearly overwhelming, too much for Rin to even consider examining this late.

But then. “I was invited here, by the royal family. I am sure that is an exception.”

The voice nearly takes Rin to his knees; it is a miracle he doesn’t collapse. Something inside of him does, however, giving way to the energy newly entered. He turns, and cannot speak.

Haru is doused in the blue of his aura, shining and luminescent like nothing Rin’s ever seen before. Much of his body is clothed in whites and blues, but his eyes are exposed and this is all Rin has ever needed. This world, cruel and hot and dry, has turned out to be merciful and bright, by the light of a single moon.

“You,” he says, regaining his voice, “are the healer that the sultan requested.”

“Yes,” Haru says, tugging away the part of the scarf that covers his mouth to speak more clearly, more slowly. He is so calm. “Why do you stare?”

Rin is not so calm. His heart feels jumpstarted, his nerves alight. He says. “I’ve never seen such an aura.”

Haru’s expression is decidedly unimpressed, if slightly intrigued. “I am sorry to bother you. I was directed to you by the guards for help to my sleeping quarters.”

And Rin has been told this, and so they go.

When the shock wears away, when the giddiness simmers into a dull buzz and Haru is away in his sleeping quarters for the night, Rin understands one single thing: Haru doesn’t remember.

He doesn’t know if this is something he should be mournful of or grateful for, but feels a little of both—mourns the life they’d had together that Haru can have no chance of remembering like Rin does, and is grateful that it means Haru isn’t suffering in the same way he is. But he also thinks that this doesn’t matter outside of his own mind—because the universe has brought him to Haru again, and as far as he’s concerned, that’s the only thing that matters at all.

In the morning Haru is put to work immediately, which he doesn’t seem to mind. If anything he looks more than happy, which makes plenty of sense when he’s given a water bath to work with. Rin watches when he can, peers out through the doorway to his tent where Haru sees to the citizens on the streets surrounding the palace, and wonders how much of Haru is changed from the previous one, and how much is stubbornly the same.

He closes his tent early, providing no excuse, but the guards say nothing when he passes them. The sun is setting and Haru is putting away his salts and patches of cloth, dressed down to a black wrap around his legs, the sun too hot for anything else. There's a sunburn on the back of his neck, but he notices Rin coming and the sight of it doesn't last long.

“They didn’t provide you with a tent?” Rin says, when he’s close enough to see the orange sky in Haru’s eyes.

Haru blinks. “They will by tomorrow,” he says, “but I didn’t mind.”

“You should have some shelter from the sun. It isn’t kind.”

Haru’s smile is devastatingly handsome, worse with the realization that Rin hasn’t seen it in twenty years. “I disagree.”

“The burn you have wouldn’t.”

Haru doesn’t look, so he must already know where the sunburn is. “It’ll fade. I can take care of it.”

He looks pointedly at the neatly stacked jars of salts, and Rin feels opportunity swell. Two of the nearest guards come to take the wooden table, carved and imported, and the tub of water is likely soon to follow.

Rin turns, so that his shoulder faces his own tent.“Why don’t you let me treat it?”

For a moment Haru keeps staring at his salts, blinking like he’s not sure he actually heard Rin say anything. Then he looks up, and he nods. His eyes narrow with a question, but he says, “Alright.”

Minutes later his tent is closed only to the public, and the candles stay lit. Haru wrinkles his nose at the sharp smell of the peppermint oil, but doesn’t flinch away when Rin starts to work it into his skin.

“It may burn,” Rin says. In response, Haru grunts.

“What is your profession?” Haru asks later, as he watches Rin properly close the tent for the night. “You don’t seem to be a healer. I asked one of the guards earlier, but he was unhelpful.”

Rin puts away the last of his incense. “I’m a medium.”

“Oh,” Haru says. “You speak with the dead?”

“When the dead feel like speaking.” Haru snorts, and Rin couldn’t conceal his grin if he wanted to. “I mostly give advice that will aid the citizens in their futures. I also heal.”

“I noticed,” Haru says, touching the patch of cloth at the nape of his neck.

“Not as well as someone like you can. It’s not my most talented area.”

Haru tilts his head to one side, and squints a single eye. “I noticed that, too.” He gives Rin a chance to scoff before he speaks again. “Do you live in the palace?”

“I do.”

“Your work must be impressive, to have caught the royal family’s attention enough to hire you.”

Haru’s manner of speak is odd; monotone by default, curiosity hidden, a clear stretch in trying to sound formal. Rin kind of wishes he would just speak normally, but knows he can’t ask for it. “I’ve lived here since I was born,” he says. “My mother was the palace’s medium before me.”

“She no longer is?”

“She passed away when I was young.”

Haru lowers his head. The blue has sunk into his skin a bit, but if Rin focuses, it easily becomes brighter. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It was a long time ago,” Rin says. “Let me change the cloth.”

Haru does, as soon as Rin crosses the tent with a freshly soaked cloth; but once it’s in place, Haru reaches up and takes a gentle hold on Rin’s wrist. It takes a moment for Rin to register, but when he does, he freezes. Haru turns, very slowly, to stare up at him.

And he asks, “Have we met somewhere before?”

Rin’s entire chest seizes. He thinks of bright hands in a field and a little boy in a pool, a gold medal on a heaving chest beneath him. In a world like this, he could tell Haru everything, and Haru might just believe him. He could be brave enough in this world, like he wasn’t in the last.

In the end, he smiles too mischievously. “Only in another life.”

Haru stares for a moment longer, then blinks and turns away. “I see,” he says. “You buy into those beliefs, do you?”

Rin almost wishes he didn’t. “You could say that.”

The royal staff indeed sets Haru up with a tent the next day, and it shields him and his work from the sun well, but this routine continues. Eventually Rin stops having to leave his own tent; Haru starts visiting instead, sometimes early enough to see him work with the citizens. Sometimes Rin won’t even notice him come in, too deep into his own work to focus on anything but what is asked of him to see.

These are the afternoons Haru asks him questions, and Rin always returns the favor.

He learns, for example, that Haru is only supposed to work as the palace’s healer for a period of two months. Two months, and then he is gone to the next kingdom, with no plans of returning. He says it casually, and it makes sense that he would; it also makes sense for him not to notice Rin’s heart dropping into his stomach like a stone, and notice he doesn’t.

“I highly doubt our kingdom will be free of disease by the time that you plan to leave,” Rin says one day, studying the lines of Haru’s right palm.

Haru regards him with a look he cannot pinpoint. “There are other healers to be summoned.”

Rin tried very hard not to hold Haru’s hand too tight. “Yes,” he says. “There are.”

He feels Haru looking at him even though he’s turned all of his attention downward; there exists the same intensity in this Haru as there was last time, familiar and comforting and bittersweet, now, knowing that it will be gone all too soon. He treasures every day he gets, seeing Haru as much as he can, making as many excuses as he’s allowed. It isn’t fair that their time has been cut so short, but he reasons that it is better than seeing nothing of Haru at all.

At least, it is easy to reason this when Haru is with him.

But when the two months pass, Haru doesn’t leave. For a while it is agonizing, waking up every morning and expecting Haru to be gone without a trace, but every morning he remains. For an extra week, then two weeks, then a month. Finally, Rin asks.

“Well,” Haru says, as casually as if he were discussing business. “I requested to stay indefinitely. The sultan approved quite easily. I was surprised.”

But Rin is the most surprised of all. And by Haru’s expression, Rin doesn’t hide it very well; nor the utter happiness, the total relief. A possibility of more time by Haru’s side.

Haru’s expression also does not hide his own mischief; Rin thinks that he may have been waiting, hoping for Rin to ask, and this thought is confirmed with the changes that come along afterward. Haru spending full days in Rin’s tent when he is not working, and inviting Rin to his own tent more and more often as the days pass. They are quickly recognized as inseparable by the citizens, as partners and as friends.

“I was hoping,” Haru says one day, when they’re alone in Rin’s tent for a window of a handful of minutes, “that you might come to my quarters tonight.”

And Rin doesn’t exactly know how to say no, so instead he says yes.

“You decorate quickly,” Rin says when he sees the room, tapestries and sashes with foreign symbols and patterns strewn and hung along the walls.

Haru says, “It’s been several months.”

“I’ve lived here my whole life,” Rin says. “My quarters are much more bare.”

Haru grunts, though he doesn’t look embarrassed. “I didn’t ask you here to talk about that, regardless.”

“But you did have a reason,” Rin says.

“Yes,” Haru nods. “You should know, I’ve watched you read auras more times than I can recall by now.”

“I know.”

Haru blinks; he is down to nothing but the same black wrap from months ago wrapped around his legs; it’s the first time Rin’s seen him so bare since then. Haru says, “You’ve never read mine.”

As soon as he points it out, as soon as he draws Rin’s attention to it, it starts to glow brighter. Rin can’t help the grin. “I haven’t out loud, at least.” Haru snorts. “You’d like for me to?”

“I’m skeptical,” Haru says, and Rin has never blamed him and doesn’t now. “So yes. I would.”

“Alright,” Rin says, “but I can give you a more specific reading with my materials.”

Rin moves for the door, but Haru steps in front of it. And though Rin could easily get by, he feels more cornered than he ever has under the look Haru pins him with.

“Tell me something simple first,” Haru says, voice so quiet Rin strains to listen. “What is it like?”

Oh. “Blue,” Rin says. “But brighter than most other blues. Clearer. Like—”

“Water,” Haru finishes for him. His eyes tighten, suspicion creeping into them and over his shoulders, hunching him over enough to make it look like he’s about ready to snap in half. “Are you saying this to please me?”

“What reason would I have to do that?”

Haru does nothing but blink. It answers the question well enough.

Rin clears his throat, feeling scrutinized. “There is … an absurd amount of energy in it, as well. It draws in those around you, because it’s immediately fascinating.”

“Does it fascinate you?”

Rin feels his mouth twitch into a smile, despite himself. “I call it electric.”

“Electric,” Haru echoes. “Where?”

Rin blinks. “I’m sorry?”

“Where,” Haru says again, looking at Rin so deeply. “I don’t see them like you do. Is it within me?”

“No. It surrounds you.”

“Show me.”

Rin waits for Haru to say more, but he doesn’t. He just stands against the door and lifts his chin and waits, too, and Rin feels the heat in the room come to him all at once through his palms and his stomach, twisting tight. Haru looks so sure.

He is merciful in that he comes forward too when Rin does, so that Rin isn’t left to close the entire distance on his own. And when they are no more than two steps apart, Rin starts to trace, as well as he can.

“It starts around here,” he says, stroking his fingers through the edges where the light fades into the rest of the room. “Then comes in, and … looks deeper.”

“Everywhere?” Haru asks. Slowly, Rin shakes his head.

“It’s thinner here,” he says, holding his hand by Haruka’s ear, watching his own skin absorb the blue in a way he cannot fathom putting into words. “Still as bright, but ...”

He doesn’t mean to touch Haru, just means to bring his hand in where the blue is less translucent; but Haru watches, and lifts his chin more, and when Rin’s fingers brush across his cheekbone Rin becomes entirely detached from the ability to draw away.

“There?” Haru asks.

Even against the harsh sun and sand and wind of this world, Haru’s skin is so soft. “Haru.”

Haru brushes his own fingertips against the back of Rin’s hand. Then he turns into it, and brushes instead his lips against the inside of Rin’s wrist.

For many reasons, Rin should not be the one to step forward, but he does—and Haru’s mouth crushes under his as beautifully as it always had before. Haru’s arms go around his shoulders, tug him close, and Rin feels blue saturate into every inch of his skin.

“I’ve wanted this,” Haru murmurs, and the buzzing under Rin’s skin carries them to the canopied bed.

Pleasure with Haru is similar, but new. In this life they’ve both had others before, and Rin has a familiarity with Haru’s body that is faded but accurate, and Haru is stripped of the shame that kept him quiet before. He makes noise, and holds tight, and calls Rin’s name like it is the only word he knows.

Afterward, they lay together. Haru holds one of his hands and lays across Rin’s stomach, tracing the skin with an odd fascination. And because Rin thinks he’s earned it, asks, “Why do you stare?”

Haru’s eyes are amused when he looks up, but his answer is serious. “You have gentle hands,” he says, quietly, pressing both of his thumbs into the palms of one—then he lets go of it, and his hands go elsewhere. “Broad shoulders. And strong arms. I wouldn’t have expected your hands to be so gentle.”

Rin hums.

Haru drags his palm down Rin’s stomach, then presses a kiss to the middle of the neat rows of his abs. “You have so much muscle here,” he mumbles. He braces both hands on Rin’s thighs and says, “Here, too.”

“You’ve made your point,” Rin whispers, nearly breathless. Haru looks up all over again.

“Have I?” he asks.

Rin says, “I’m strong.”

“No,” Haru says, walking himself up on his hands so that he is hovering over Rin. His hair hangs over his forehead like a curtain, and the blue that surrounds him now is almost as stunning as it was when Rin was moving inside of him. Haru touches Rin’s hair, and says, “You are beautiful.”

Lost for words, lost in his own amazement, lost in the blue of Haruka’s very life energy, Rin can do nothing but reach up and kiss him again.

This life is beautiful and full of magic, and has always been, but with Haru, everything is always brighter.

-

In his fifth life, his memories take the longest to come to him than they ever have before. He is sixteen before he can recall even the first of his memories, and is twenty-five before he remembers Haru. But it is merciful, in a way, because in this life, there is war and tragedy and sadness, and he doesn’t meet Haru at all and doesn’t think he’d want Haru to live in a world like this anyway.

And Rin dies young. He survives a draft into the war and gunfire and chemicals that burn and choke and kill; he sees friends die at his feet and learns that sometimes life is wasteful. But he himself survives, until he is in the backseat of a taxi en route to an airport and is caught in a collision.

He had only grandparents in this life, and they are the last thing he thinks of. He hopes very hard that they are able to move on happily and quickly, and this hope is how he knows he is already dying, in his late twenties, lonely and unfulfilled.

-

A man in a dark blue raincoat comes into the bar just as Rin wipes it down, the aftermath of a group of rowdy college kids out for one friend’s first legal drink. Rin is about to ask him if the storm has let up at all since he began his shift at six, but the words are stolen away when the man looks him in the eye.

He is twenty-two, and in this life he has remembered nothing until now. Haru’s face goes concerned, clearly worried for the bartender who’s gone suddenly pale and still; Rin recovers in the best way he can manage, then shakily offers him a drink on the house. Warily, Haru accepts it.

Minutes later Rin calms himself enough to finally ask that question about the weather—and, after being bombarded with memories of bloody battlefields and a desert landscape and a single beautiful life, three hours later finds them both stumbling into Rin’s studio apartment, drunk more on each other than any kind of alcohol. In this life, their sex is only sex—Haru is gone in the morning, and Rin hates that he cries over it.

He enters a relationship with the very next person who shows him the kindest interest, and he forces it to work. They last a year and a half, and their romance is sweet and their fights are whole, their being together enough for Rin to even say he fell in love, but just as in his dreadfully dreary second life, it doesn’t satisfy him in the way he wanted it to, so badly.

But a month after it ends, a familiarly dark blue raincoat walks into a coffee shop after him, and Haru enters his life for good.

For good, but maybe not for the better.

They fall in love, because of course they do. But in this life, they don’t last; their relationship reaches four years, before the fighting becomes enough that Haru packs his bags and leaves; doesn’t just threaten to, but actually does. And the worst part of it is that Rin lets him, and is maybe even happy to.

They stay friends. They find happiness that way. And Rin doesn’t find love in anyone else, but Haru does.

In this life, he mourns a number of things, and he watches the only person he’s ever been capable of wholly loving, love someone else.

-

For many more lives, it is like this. Haru sometimes doesn’t appear for him at all, and these are maybe the worst lives he’s lived; although if Haru does show up, sometimes it isn’t for very long. Rin has been exhausted since his second life, but lifetimes and lifetimes add on a kind of exhausted that reaches into the soul and warps it.

He thinks that it might be different if Haru ever remembered him in the same way. But no matter how they find each other, Haru never does.

He’s loved Haru as a one night stand in a life lasting forty years. He’s loved Haru for the last thirty years of an eighty-year-old life. He has loved Haru since childhood, then lost him along the way. And in each one, the most exhausting part is waiting.

Waiting to meet Haru, if he even will. Waiting for Haru to fall for him, too, if he’s going to. Wait for Haru to stay, or hope that he will. All sometimes fulfilled, all sometimes fruitless.

But all Haru. All beautiful. And all terrifying.

-

The life that he finally tells Haru what he’s been keeping secret is one eerily similar to the third life he lived.

They meet as children, and grow up together. This is the first time Rin is born knowing, and therefore this childhood is the oddest. They swim together, but this time, they are continuously on the same team. And their love grows as slowly as their friendship does, and it is reciprocated and beautiful and young, and so carefree Rin can hardly believe it.

He tells Haru on a Saturday, during their third year of high school. It takes hours to tell, but Haru is patient in his intrigue, even if he doesn’t wholly believe it. Rin thinks he might want to believe it, and that’s why he listens so intently.

Whatever it is, telling Haru is the greatest relief he’s had in many, many lifetimes.

“Rin,” Haru says, when Rin is done and emotionally exhausted, fingers pressed into his forearm, “I really almost believe you.”

Rin smiles, because it is all he has the energy to do. “You’re lucky that you get to not believe it,” he says, and Haru rolls his eyes, and it is wonderful to see.

But telling Haru isn’t all good. With the story comes questions—some Rin can answer, and some he doesn’t know how to. He can tell Haru stories from their past lives together, in the different time periods they experienced together, but can’t tell Haru why or how it happens. And perhaps worst of all, with the story comes being able to talk about the cycle—and this means catharsis, aloud.

It starts when they’re driving home together, in the middle of a storm. The rain fogs the road and blurs the signs, and a driver cutting through the intersection they’re approaching misses his cue to stop. He misses them, but only barely; if they’d been two second quicker, their car would have been struck, and it is this thought that sends Rin spiraling.

The panic attack comes when they reach the apartment. For a half an hour Rin can only cry, and Haru holds him, confused and concerned that a simple almost-incident could cause him so much pain. And this is where he has to explain.

“I can’t stand it,” Rin gasps, aware that he is shaking, aware of his hands in fists and his jaw clenched tight but unable to stop any of it. “I can’t—God, Haru, if something happened to you, or to us, or to me and I left—and I moved on and you weren’t there—how am I—why—”

“It’s okay,” Haru’s whispering, voice so lost. “Rin, it’s alright.”

And Rin sobs, openly and brokenly, neck snapping forward each time. “I can’t handle another one without you,” he whispers, voice jumping. “I don’t know what I’d do, Haru, I can’t do it anymore. I can’t. I don’t know—”

“Rin,” Haru says. “Rin, that was just a story.”

“No,” Rin says, “it’s not. It’s torture.”

“Rin—”

“Haru,” Rin snaps. “I’m a fucking flaw in the system. What can I tell you? I remember every life that I live and my past ones just won’t fucking let me _be_. And you—you’re the only thing—” he holds tighter, scared to death that Haru might pull away. “I go through each life so fucking terrified I’m not going to find you, or ever see you again afterwards. It’s terrifying. Nothing’s ever scared me so damn much, Haru. And it happens every time. Every damn time.”

Haru goes quiet, and stays quiet for a long time. He must realize talking keeps Rin talking, too, because all he does is hold Rin and rock him, hush him, and soon enough, Rin exhausts himself enough to stay calm.

They get to bed, miraculously—Haru changes Rin and helps him under the covers, and they pull each other close as soon as Haru joins him. Haru strokes his fingers through Rin’s hair and kisses his face, and soon enough he stops shaking. But neither fall asleep.

Haru says, with all the sincerity in the world in his voice, and in his eyes, “You’re not lying.”

Rin shakes his head.

Haru curls himself over Rin, protective and strong. He holds both of Rin’s hands in his own and squeezes them. “Then I’ll wait,” he says. “I’ll wait. Or look for you. In every life I live.”

Rin swallows. “You never remember.”

“Then like I said. I’ll wait.”

It is at times like this that Rin wishes most of all that he could forget like Haru does. Forget and be ignorant, and not be haunted by his past and what he knows will come. But now Haru knows, and Haru believes him, and still Haru is so fearless. He presses his forehead against Haruka’s chest and says, “You might wait an eternity.”

It is something that, in every life, Rin has admired about Haru—that he does not fear death. But even more unreachable than that, that he does not fear life. Haru kisses him, gently, several times. He rubs his thumbs into the palms of Rin’s hands. He is solid and sure, and no less is his voice when he says, “You’re worth longer than that.”

Rin starts to cry again, even though he doesn’t want to. _I love you_ _,_ he thinks. _Haru, I love you. So much. So much._

This life is long, and happy. And in it, Haru believes him, and doesn’t leave him for a moment.

-

He is ten when he remembers it all, this time. Ten and standing in a waterfall, and he is able to feel grateful, above anything else. Grateful even though he hasn’t found Haru yet, for a reason he can’t place.

And he doesn’t find Haru, but the gratefulness doesn’t leave him. This life, back in Japan, is peaceful. He studies philosophy in college, and writes again; something he hasn’t done faithfully since his second life to memory. It is healthy, and cathartic, and he publishes before he’s twenty.

He hasn’t realized anything spectacular; that is what makes this life so odd. He has had no epiphany, no change to his habits. He still thinks of Haru, still hopes for him. But it is a different kind of hope than before. He is content just living his life, and this is maybe the greatest thing besides Haru that his existence has ever given him.

He is twenty-three now, and he is in Tokyo. A friend from college is getting married, and he’s supposed to pick up his suit—he’s lost. It’s amusing, having been to Tokyo more times than several lifetimes could hold and still not knowing, and he is moments away from stopping a stranger for help when he sees it.

A shock of black hair over blue eyes, through the crowd of people on the sidewalk. Rin’s heart rate takes a dive, and he tries not to wonder, tries not to hope.

But slowly, the crowd clears. Haru is staring through the window of a flower shop, his shadow solid on the ground behind him. He is glowing in the light, and he is all Rin can see.

There is no hesitation. Rin turns, makes his way over. The world is a blur rushing by, and his footsteps bring Haru’s eyes to his.

Like every other time, Rin thinks of all the things he can do, all the things he’ll have to. Love Haru again, deeply and presently, for another lucky life. Deal with whatever other obstacles come between them. Explain, maybe, what Haru means to him, all over again.

But in a beautiful, new kind of moment, Rin sees a spark behind Haru’s eyes; it is reflected in a smile that grows, small but true. And somehow, Rin knows.

Haru turns, and says, “Rin.”


End file.
